The insane true crime backstory to Pixies song ‘Wave of Mutilation’
Black Francis, the iconic figurehead of Boston alt-rock band Pixies, knows his stuff when it comes to writing energised, creatively enlightened rock songs. After co-founding Pixies alongside Joey Santiago, Kim Deal and David Lovering in 1986, Francis garnered an early cult following on the East Coast with his trademark “loud-quiet-loud” formula.
Pixies’ style was pivotally influential on the grunge era to come and served as a bridge from earlier progenitors like R.E.M. and Crazy Horse. Despite pioneering a distinctive formula, Francis brought variety in a combination of textures and abstract yet ubiquitously entertaining lyrics. Whether “swimming in the Caribbean” or “wishing on a cement floor”, Francis’ poetry often obscures depths of profound darkness.
For instance, the 1988 song ‘Cactus’ is a tragic story of perverted longing from the perspective of an incarcerated man. Meanwhile, ‘Here Comes Your Man’ is the story of “winos and hobos travelling on the trains, who die in the California Earthquake, peeing their pants,” disguised by Kim Deal’s sumptuous bassline.
With that in mind, it doesn’t take an Einstein to suppose ‘Wave of Mutilation’, the classic Doolittle cut, is about a rather distressing occurrence. In the opening verse, Francis sings, “Cease to resist, giving my goodbye / Drive my car into the ocean / You’ll think I’m dead, but I sail away / On a wave of mutilation”. It’s not immediately apparent what’s happening here, but it’s certainly no Wombles ditty.
In one of Francis’ more literal arrangements, the lyrics refer to real men driving real cars into the ocean. In a past interview, the frontman revealed that ‘Wave of Mutilation’ was inspired by something he read about “Japanese businessmen doing murder-suicides with their families because they’d failed in business, and they’re driving off a pier into the ocean”.
Like waves, this crime is tragically recurrent, but there also appears to be a religious angle. The line, “You’ll think I’m dead,” is suggestive of an afterlife of financial freedom, yet the mutilation is irreversible.
Francis maintains the nautical setting in the second verse by referencing the El Niño phenomenon. During a 2004 concert, the singer claimed to have been the first songwriter to do so. “This song is from about 15 years ago, and while I didn’t invent it, I was the first guy to sing about El Niño before it became all popular and everything,” he said lightheartedly. “I just wanted to take credit for that.”
Francis discussed this part of the song in more depth in a 2014 conversation with Esquire. “It references the El Niño streams and weather patterns, and there are contemporary references in it, but they all are there to kind of serve this nautical state,” he said. “Water going up and down and moving across the earth and the churning up of organic material turning into rock, water turning into clouds. Like the Yoko Ono song says, ‘We are all water from different rivers.'”
Listen to Pixies’ ‘Wave of Mutilation’ below.
